BankerVision

Local knowledge is everything

As I mentioned in my last post, I was doing work on the frontline with some our staff in JobCentre Plus last week. I was in a disadvantaged area in Scotland, somewhere around Glasgow, and  as I said before, the experience was incredibly valuable.

It is so easy to imagine how things will work in production when you’re remote, but you don’t really know how they’re going to work in practice. That’s why (as I said in my last post) you see good people at the frontline who cover over the cracks with manual workarounds, paper based systems, and their own home-built IT.

I mean, let’s face it. No matter how many requirements you gather, no system is going to be perfect for every single user in every single situation. I suppose the art is to get as many use cases that suit as many people as possible whilst minimising the inconvenience you cause to everyone else.

But there was a particular eye-opening, smack in the face, ah-ha moment in the whole week for me. And I know, as I relate it to you, you’re going to say “well, duh!”, especially given the fact that I do work in the trend space as part of my day job.

Here it is: Local knowledge is everything. 

There is a particular stage in the present back-to-work regime in the UK that requires people who’ve not worked  for about two months to attend a 1 hour group session with a staff member for Job Centre Plus, who explains to them what they’re required to do from a benefits perspective, and who provides a basic refresher on what to do to get a job.

There is a script full of guidance notes on what to say, and you have to be trained specially to give the session.

Anyway, so I sat in on one of these, and got to watch.

The script, had it been given verbatim, would not have provided all that much additional value at all to the attendees, I suspect. But the presenter in my session had detailed local knowledge of who was hiring, who wasn’t, and what facilities were available in the local community to help job-seekers. Questions weren’t answered in generalities: there were specific, do-right-now action points. The local stuff made all the difference, and you could see the attendees going from disinterested, to interested, to pleased they’d attended.

I mean, I don’t know why I was surprised at how valuable locality turned out to be, because we’ve all been talking hyper-local on social sites for a few years. But to see it in action for people suffering the recession: well, it made me recognise the value of all this stuff more than intellectually. I mean, I believed in it before, but now I believe it.

The value of local knowledge is no great revelation I suppose. But it certainly is good to get reminded of the fact that at the edges, small things – like which specific building sites are hiring today - are the most important things.

Now, of course, there is a lesson here for those of us who are responsible for building systems. When we build them, rigidly prescribing every sequence and every transaction, what we tend to do is eliminate the value of locality.

We seek to use systems to impose standards of service and uniformity across the offering. “People are unreliable!”, we scream as we write as much discretion away from users as possible, thinking, as we do so, that we are serving both them and the customers.

Well, we’re not. What we’re actually doing is eliminating those things that would really make what we do thrill customers. At the edge, where people meet real customers, such a standard offering doesn’t thrill anyone. It may provide some value to most people. But I suspect that only outliers would actually be thrilled.

And, yes, I do think it is possible even for job-seekers to be thrilled in their interaction with a government department.

Anyway, the fact of the matter is that  people recognise this and find their own ways to generate thrill. That’s why you see all this stuff springing up around the systems, service, and processes that get provided centrally. 

Thank you, Jobcentre Plus, for reminding me of something so fundamental as this.

The In-Betweeners

You know, I think I have a very good work-life balance. I spend enough hours in the office that I think we’re accomplishing things. I do lots of private work-like things (writing here, reading the right blogs and twitter, participating in the online conversation, writing books, and the evening networking schedule) that are in the middle between work and leisure. And I have plenty of free time still to relax at home, or go out.

There is a graduation in my life between what is totally work (the office) and what is totally leisure (blobbing out at home or being with friends).

Having that graduation is a vital determinant of how well I can perform in the workplace.

For example, as an innovator, I really need to know what’s going on in the mobile phone market or what people think the next big trend is going to be. As a manager, I really need to the latest thinking which comes out of various thought leaders. And as someone who is responsible for a technical architecture team, it is important that I have at least a remote clue about what’s going on in that space.

These are all things I get in the in-between that’s in the middle between real work and real leisure. I am in a competition with my peers in each of these areas to know what’s going on, and I can’t have a rational conversation with them unless I am at least as up to date as they are.

Conversely, if they know more than me, is it reasonable I should have any rights to be part of the decision making for which they are clearly more expert?

Being as up to date as possible is table stakes now.

The In-betweeners (a name i just dreamt up, by the way) seem to be way more up to date, and way more able to have a reasonable conversation about the way things are likely to turn out.

But there are lots of people who don’t have an in-between. They do work, and they do leisure. There is no fine graduation between the two. Theirs is the Work-Life balance argument. The moment the office is left, take physical steps to make sure that work can’t interrupt at all. Turn off the devices. Shut down the email. Don’t take a phone call. And under no circumstances read anything at all that might have worky-like overtones.

Let me not for one moment make judgements about that lifestyle choice, which is perfectly valid. I mean, I probably do have fewer family and other commitments than most to which I must assign time. Although, there are some colleagues of mine who have very large families and who still manage to keep up, so I don’t know why I’m making that excuse, actually.

But let us not spend 2010 pretending that there isn’t a difference in performance between those who are up to date and those who aren’t.

2010 is going to be a performance – not an experience – competition. That’s why I said the other day that I think people who are connected are going to get all the rewards this year. It’s going to be about making things happen, and that means you need an in-between.

Because making things happen is not a 9 to 5 job any more. The conversation continues 24 x 7. Some of those conversations have unusual levels of significance.

I think it is possible to find a personally appropriate in-between that lets you participate whilst continuing to live a full life in the outside world. And I also think that those who don’t are going to get marginalised as their peers step up.

Update: Shane Dillon comments on the davepress blog that I “appropriated” the term “In-Betweener”. That made me check Google, and he’s right. The term actually refers to a Marvel Comics superhero. The wiki entry makes interesting reading, and is quite apt given the subject of my post.

2010 Predictions

Last week, I wrote down some of my thoughts for 2009. There have been both lows and highs, but mostly highs. 2009 was a good year. I’m expecting that there’ll be some pretty big highs in 2010 as well. As is everyone’s want to do at this time, I thought I’d make some guesses what the year holds ahead.

No doubt, we’ll all look back at this next year and laugh. That’s the fun of it of course.

Anyway, onto my top predictions for the coming year.

1. Banks, governments and everyone will get really, really, serious about innovation

The last couple of years have seen a lot of talking about innovation, but not really all that much doing it. There are enough high profile innovation successes starting to emerge though (even though they may have happened by accident) that people can now begin to see the power of this stuff when applied properly.

I think this is going to result in a number of very big programmes starting this year. It will all be copycat, of course (“What? They’ve spent that on innovation? We have to double that…!”), and I’d expect a few very high profile programme cancellations in the next 18 months. But overall, the momentum is going to be huge in 2010.

And that is going to lead to some game changing plays from organisations we’d always thought were anything but innovative. I would not be surprised to see a bank doing something so unusual that people’s mouths drop. Like, for example, someone running a similar model to Caja Navarra’s here in the UK.

Or a government department reaching out to citizens and bringing them right inside service delivery.

Or a major corporate releasing a hit product that’s been 100% designed by customers, and which climbs the adoption curve so quickly that their large competitors go out of business.

All that will drive us to an “Innovation Frenzy” by the end of 2010, and if you are a corporate innovator, you can expect 2010 to be a very big year.

2. Citizens will start to deploy tools that do the things that big companies and governments used to do.

Governments and corporates are beginning to make their data available online so that citizens can do what they want with it. But I predict that if government doesn’t make its data available quickly enough, citizens will find ways to get it anyway. Screen scraping works, you know. Then they’ll build what they want, and waiting for government to provide stuff… well why?

3. Crowd-think emerges

This is the year someone senior in a large corporation is going to discover that if you put 10 Gen-Yers in a room and give them a project, the outcome is likely to better than if you put a single, experienced person with 10 years on it. The next generation of workers is quite different to what we’ve been used to, and their hyper-connection means their work operates in a parallel, and highly synergistic fashion.

Then I’d say we’ll begin to see strategic decisions being made by committees of these people. They’ll be small at first but the power of these groups of generation – Y thinkers will get more obvious. Success will breed more success.

It will be 2010 when the signs this is happening really become obvious.

In the next decade, by the way, these are the same people who will be in real management positions in their own right, and crowd-think will happen no matter what the current managers think, whether they like it or not.

And what will happen to the experienced people of today? They’ll still have a role of course, but they’ll be advisors to the decision makers rather than decision makers themselves.

Don’t believe me?

Check out your graduate programme, if you have one, and watch how those people are interacting now. Watch them work together on a project, and don’t fail to notice that no single leader emerges in overall control. Leadership moves around dynamically based on skills and competence.

Then project that forward a few years when we  starting giving them management jobs of real importance.

4. Those who don’t get “social” will never get a decent performance review again.

I’ve written about the difference between those who are connected (online) and those who aren’t, and suggested that there’s a visible performance gap between the two groups.

Well, I’m of the view that this is the year that the difference is going to make itself felt at performance review time. Oh, not everyone will likely recognise the fact that they’re being marked down because they aren’t connected enough, but it will begin to happen anyway.

Here’s why.

Those with the right connections have much superior, and much much more timely data at their fingertips. They consequently make robust decisions fast, and their pace of output goes up. Their work is not only produced more quickly, its quality rises.

One person in my team, for example, can turn around a report in a day or two, whereas everyone else quotes weeks – even a month sometimes – to do the same thing.

Now, when you’re the manager in that position, who do you give the top marks to?

This will all be bad news, of course to those who “don’t have time to read blogs”, or whatever social media tool is currently in fashion. It will also be bad news to those who think that you get to turn off the moment you leave the office.

Those days are gone.  There is a new level of performance emerging, and the bar is getting raised in 2010. People are going to have step up this year, or expect there will be personal consequences.

And not, as I said earlier, because anyone will do anything deliberate, like impose a performance improvement plan or something. It will be because all the top marks will go to those who are connected from now on.

Experience is important, but performance is the new yardstick in 2010

Welcome to 2010, everyone, and I hope you have a fantastic year.

Terrible Innovator No: 6 – The Cowboy

The following is the last excerpt from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank in my series on terrible innovation employees I identify six archetypal innovation employees you should watch out for, and the last is “The Cowboy”.  From Chapter 9:

The final kind of innovator to watch out for is the Cowboy.  Such individuals are very, very committed to their innovations, so much so that no blockage can stand in their way. They go after what is needed to make the new thing happen, and they do so with gusto.

Unfortunately, they also do it without much thought as to what will happen after they’ve rammed the innovation down everyone’s throats.

If Cowboys are lucky, they’ll at least get their current innovation out the door and into the hands of customers. But in doing so they will have locked themselves out of being able to do the next round of innovation.  Cowboys are aware that they are burning influence to make things happen, but their focus is so much on the now that they don’t permit themselves to consider how they will deliver the next innovation, or the one after that.

I’ve met innovators in this category, in fact, who feel that if they can just get this innovation out the door, all sins will be forgiven, no matter how heinous. That, of course, is never true, because for every innovation there are both winners and losers. The losers will never be happy that the innovation makes it out the door at all, but the winners will also likely have a bad taste in their mouths: they might have a successful innovation on their hands, but to get it they were forced to do something they didn’t want.  There is very little upside here.

Another failing of the Cowboy is that they will almost never drown the puppy. They get so invested in one particular innovation (which they have burned a huge amount of influence to promote) that failure is not an option.  Even if the Key Questions turn out to be less than positive they won’t let things go. And they can’t: their personal success is tied into achieve this one, great thing. They have no choice but to continue, since if they fail, they are left with nothing.

That, of course, just highlights to everyone that their performance is sorely lacking.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the Terrible Innovators. I’ll be returning to normal posting from now on.

Previous terrible innovators:

• The Gadgeteer
• The Talker
• The Consultant
• The Lone Ranger
• The Defeatist

Reprinted from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, published by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2009.

Terrible Innovator No. 5: The Defeatist

The following is the latest excerpt from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank. I identify six archetypal innovation employees you should watch out for, and the fifth is “The Defeatist”.  From Chapter 9:

If you got to choose the kind of bad innovator you hired by mistake, you’d want the defeatist. The only danger that comes from having a defeatist innovator is that you have to carry the headcount without getting any return. The reason? The defeatist will look at any new thing and be so overwhelmed by navigating the institution to get success they are unable to do anything at all.

These are the individuals whose first response to any innovation is ‘that’s too innovative for us’. The problem of course, is that the defeatist doesn’t have the correct amount of influence to get what-ever-it-is accepted, and for some reason is unable to admit it.

Now, although the defeatist doesn’t burn influence (as they probably won’t get up enough courage to see anyone), they are insidious because they drag down all the good performers as well. Innovation is a tough game, and requires a great deal of self confidence and poise: after all, the innovator is going to face rejection far more than he or she will have successes. A positive outlook is essential. Having someone in the team who is negative just takes energy away from the main effort.

I’ll post the last archetype, “The Cowboy” on Monday, before I go on Christmas break.

Previous terrible innovators:

• The Gadgeteer
• The Talker
• The Consultant
• The Lone Ranger

Reprinted from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, published by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2009.

Terrible Innovator No. 4: The Lone Ranger

The following is a brief excerpt from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, my text on corporate innovation. I identify six archetypes you should watch out for, and the fourth is “The Lone Ranger”.  From Chapter 9:

Another kind of poor innovation performer is the Lone Ranger. Lone Rangers are innovators who prefer to work alone. They like to have everything under their personal control, cannot bear to delegate any work to anyone, and need to be personally involved in every single, little detail of their innovations.

They imagine they, and they alone, are all it will take to get an innovation out the door. They engage in individual heroics to make try to move things along, but usually fail to deliver much because almost all innovations require a team of people to actually get things to happen.

The problem here is one of output. People tend to have definite preference for innovation styles. There are Creators, who come up with the new ideas. Perfectors, who go through each idea making sure it can actually be implemented before much work is done. Embellishers, who are great at selling ideas and getting people excited. And, most importantly, Implementors, who know what to do to make things happen.

The thing is, most people don’t have all four innovation styles, and are, at best, a great synergy of two. The Lone Ranger, of course, is no different to the rest of us, and is unlikely to have all four in equal measure.

Consequently, when they try to make things happen in isolation, they usually fail.

Naturally, this is never the fault of the Lone Ranger and his or her lack of teaming. There will always be an excuse for the lack of real output. “We aren’t innovative”, or “the business case didn’t work” or, “no one was interested” are typical excuses. There will always be excuses, and the number you get depends on how many of the innovation preferences the Lone Ranger is missing.

Lone Rangers are ineffective at best, but completely destructive at worst. Because they don’t want to share, they render everyone who relies on their particular innovation preference unable to function as well.

I’ll post the remaining 2 archetypes before the Christmas break.

Previous terrible innovators:

• The Gadgeteer
• The Talker
• The Consultant

Reprinted from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, published by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2009.

Future leaders, and IT contradicts

Interrupting my series of Terrible Innovators for a moment, you may be interested in these recent things:

Over at Computing magazine, I write about the future of IT leadership, specifically, that in an era where the ownership of IT systems is becoming unclear, the role of technologies leaders is also becoming blurred. Do they have a role in the future? I don’t know, but what I do know is that our new managers, the ones coming up IT now, are way better rounded than their siloed predecessors. Anyway, read the article, and especially the rebuttal from one of the current generation IT leaders who says I’m wrong.

Then, over at Finextra, they are running a feature (pulled from the book, actually) on the prioritisation that CIOs have, compared with what innovators need to make change. My point, there, is that CIOs have such vastly different priorities to innovators that they are fundamentally unable to embrace innovation and keep on keeping on.

Hope you find these interesting , and I’ll be back with Terrible Innovator No. 4 – the Lone Ranger – tomorrow.

Terrible Innovator #3: the consultant

The following is a brief excerpt from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, my text on corporate innovation. I identify six archetypes you should watch out for, and the third is “The Consultant”.  From Chapter 9:

At the other end of the scale (from the Gadgeteer), you have consultant-innovators. They don’t focus on the answer to the business situation (an answer that will, hopefully, be something innovative), and instead concentrate of defining the problem to be solved.

Now, of course it is necessary to have a pretty good definition of a problem before it can addressed in any reasonable way, but the consultant-innovator will write reports and requirements documents till the cows come home.

A key sign you have a consultant-innovator on your hands is that they will try to run ‘workshops’ to get a group understanding of a problem. They’ll attempt to produce facts and figures that describe it. They’ll always seek more data to clarify things. And then, when it comes right down to it, they won’t propose either a solution or a pathway to getting one.

The consultant-innovator’s hallmark is such a narrow focus on the business problem that they don’t ever get to using influence to push the next innovative thing. They’d much rather study the issues and create Powerpoint.

But the Consultant-Innovator is a deceptive creature, and that’s because (at the start at least), their workshops and problem definition work have actual value to stakeholders. Senior leaders call in consultants all the time in order to get independent views of their issues. Having an innovator do the same thing competently (probably for free) has an intuitive appeal.

Stakeholders, however, are unlikely to be thrilled with fact-finding that never terminates. That’s the danger of the Consultant-Innovator, and influence burning is the eventual result, as it was with the Gadgeteer.

I’ll post the remaining 3 archetypes over December.

Previous terrible innovators:

•  The Gadgeteer
• The Talker

Reprinted from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, published by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2009.

Terrible Innovator #2: The Talker

The following is a brief excerpt from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, my text on corporate innovation. I identify six archetypes you should watch out for, and the second is “The Talker”.  From Chapter 9:

Now we come to the Talker, one of the most destructive of all innovators. The talker is a superlative communicator, and when you put one on a stage in front of an audience, you get inspirational words that create excitement for the innovation experience.

The Talker is also great at networking, and is able to get to practically anyone in an organisation. Usually only once, mind you, because the great failing of the Talker is they never do anything.

If only innovation was about giving speeches and taking meetings, Talkers would be the most successful innovators in the world. But unfortunately, it isn’t. There’s a lot of hard work involved, and a great idea may as well remain unthought-of if no one is going to work through the Key Questions to take things forwards.

Talkers, because they are great communicators and know how to open doors through their personal networks, will often have a greatly inflated view of their worth.  They imagine that because people are enthusiastic about their ideas they are successful. That, obviously, is not the case if an innovation team is being measured on actual changes they create.

Another thing to watch out for with the Talker is the regular status meeting with the innovation leader to whom they report. Because they are such great communicators, it is likely the case that the innovation leader will be lulled into a sense of security just because doors are opening that were unavailable before. The Talker will be excellent at doing smoke and mirror performances that make it look like progress is being made, even when it isn’t.

The key signal of a talker is that you get the same status updates all the time, with promises they are ‘close’ to closing new innovations. Or that they have ‘just one more meeting’ to get agreement. A real innovator would drown the puppy, and forget the ‘one more meeting’. Talkers, though, have nothing to back them up but the meetings they’ve been able to get.

As you’d expect, the Talker is also someone who burns influence. They do it at a great rate, because stakeholders, having met with them once or twice, realise that nothing is going to come of further interactions and stop letting innovators in. The Talker, who needs to get meetings to justify him or herself then moves on to the next stakeholder, where the same thing is repeated.

I’ll post the remaining 4 archetypes over December.

You can read about “The Gadgeteer” in this post.

Reprinted from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, published by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2009.

Terrible Innovator #1: The Gadgeteer

The following is a brief excerpt from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, my text on corporate innovation. I identify six archetypes you should watch out for, and the first is “The Gadgeteer”.  From Chapter 9:

When you have an innovator who focuses most of their time on the latest and greatest technological thing, you are likely to have a gadgeteer. A gadget is a deceptively dangerous thing for an innovator. On the one hand, it seems the new thing (if only it could be sold correctly to stakeholders) would be a fantastic addition to the innovation portfolio. But on the other, there is practically no way to tie whatever-it-is back to any business problem.

This is the hallmark of the gadgeteer – a pursuit of new things without any conceptualisation of what business problem is being solved.

Gadgeteers are dangerous for innovation teams because they burn influence at a fast rate. It only takes one poor meeting with a stakeholder (who will likely ask ‘So what?’) to close that door to innovators thereafter. A door slammed in one’s face is one less avenue for the future to get predictability in the innovation portfolio.

But the worst thing about having a gadgeteer around is they reinforce a stereotype that an innovation programme must try to undo as quickly as possible: that innovation is about way-out things with little relevance to the business.

Whenever you spot an innovator continuously wasting influence pushing something that has no direct bearing on a business problem, its time to call it a day.

I’ll post the remaining 5 archetypes over December.

Reprinted from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, published by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2009.